In his junior year regular season finale, Kendall Young topped the 1,000-point plateau in a 23-point loss to Blanchester. The junior joined an exclusive group among Williamsburg’s basketball greats, but with the milestone now nine months behind him, Young and the Wildcats are looking to get back to the top of the Southern Buckeye Conference National Division.

“Kendal is our returning leading scorer, he averaged about 22 a game last year, so of course we’re definitely counting on him,” head coach Dan McKibben said.

“We’re senior-heavy this year. Max Madsen has played really well this fall, shot the ball well and working harder. We’re looking to get some contributions from him. Luke Workman is our senior point guard and he has scored a lot of points, so he’s someone who has contributed offensively as well as defensively. Then Tanner Supe, our senior center, he’s come a long way and made a lot of progress. Between those four seniors and Ryan Boggs, another senior who is having some back issues, along with a couple of juniors pushing for starting minutes, we’re looking to go seven or eight deep.”

Even with the depth that the Wildcats are boasting this season, a majority of their success will come down to Young, a 6-foot-2 shooting guard. The Williamsburg offense will be centered around him, but as it is with prolific scorers, the opposing defenses will be designed to stop him.

Sitting on 1,025 points in just three years, Young will need to find ways to get open and create his own shot to help the Wildcats reach their goals of getting back to winning league championships.

“We’re hoping to compete for a league title,” McKibben said. “We won one two years ago and then had a down year last year. We graduated six seniors from that championship team and I don’t think any of us realized how badly we would miss those guys and how hard it would be to replace them.

“Georgetown is probably the favorite (to win the league), Batavia’s right up there as well, so I think if we play well on any given night, we can compete with both of them.”

While the Wildcats will get a few games to start the season out of conference to get their bearings about them, the first Southern Buckeye Conference game looms large as Williamsburg hosts Batavia on Dec. 7.

That conference opener kicks off a six-game stretch through the end of 2012 that pits Williamsburg against five league opponents, meaning a good start will be key to competing for that league title.

Williamsburg will play at Clermont Northeastern on Dec. 11, followed by their first tilt with McKibben’s SBC-National favorite, Georgetown that Friday, Dec. 14.